As the Spanish could neither defeat the Southeastern Natives nor establish colonial settlements, they tried a third strategy: missionization.
In the late 16th century, the Spanish began to make formal alliances with Native chiefs who were providedwith luxury goods and military support in return for having missions in their villages and providing food and labor for St. Augustine. The plan was to turn missions into agricultural plantations and the Indiansinto peasant colonists, and for a while it worked providing millions of pounds of food and thousands of laborers for St. Augustine. At least 76 missions were established by the Franciscans over the next century.
Archaeologists have investigated 33 mission villages to find that there usually was only a church and friary and only a few Spanish goods, in otherwise traditional Indian settlements. Surprisingly, no map of the mission locations has yet been found by historians and it is often difficult to determine exactly which mission archaeologists have discovered.
